Ready Player None

Chapter 3.3 - Wyett "Mama Said Knock You Out"

"Wy, you're not listening to me."

I'm actually just guessing about what she said. I wasn't listening.

"You have an important responsibility here, and something something people rely on you something something find someone else to handle this."

Again, that's a very rough estimate. There were probably a few more words involved, and she is definitely still talking. For my part, I'm focused on working out the most efficient time delay between the suppression debuff skill and any of the three area-of-effect attacks I could toss out the next time I encountered HER. That was my mistake, I didn't clear enough time for my attacks. I needed to slow her down, counter her initial strategy, and hit back before she could recover. I was way too confident.

"Whoosh."

Okay, that wasn't anything Nana said, it was the sound of her palm speeding through the air as it approached my face. The expected loud smack sound followed, surprisingly intense cheek pain was right behind, along with a few muted cheers from those office drones who had been pretending not to be enthralled by my public reprimand. I wasn't going to waste time figuring out which one did what, I would just find a way to punish all of them. As a group. Later.

"Ow! What did you do that for?" I decided the best move was to hold my reddened cheek in feigned innocence. It used to work a lot more reliably than it did now, for some reason. When I was four.

"Wyett, you are a grown man, and yet the only way I can ever get through to you is to treat you like a 5 year old." Clearly, something happened between ages four and five that had severely impaired my ability to get away with things.

"Does that mean I can have ice cream?" I asked hopefully.

"Would it get you to review logistics requests within a week? If so, you can have an office freezer full," she responded, sighing. "There are hundreds of communities who depend on us, depend on you, and that's about half the number there were when your grandfather handled the job in his spare time. I don't begrudge you your play, but you have to learn how to prioritize. More important things have to come first."

Enlightened, I straightened immediately and said "Yes, they do!"

She was absolutely right. I should start with my most massive hammer attack, and let the stun effect give me time to cast the debuffs. It wasn't as effective against groups, due to a limited range and a reflective effect that slowed me for a short time, so I rarely began an encounter with it. But it didn't appear that SHE ran with a group. Very wise advice, indeed. I refocused on my grandmother once again; she had earned my attention.

She wasn't talking. No real way to know how long she had been silent while my mind was elsewhere, and definitely no way to know the next thing I should say. Something non-committal, like "I suppose that's one way to see things" or "You're right"?

Too risky. What if she had just said "I think you should be disinherited"?

I chose silence.

Her eyes bored into my skull as though trying to crack it open. After many motionless seconds of our administrative staring contest, Nana Sam gave up, and wandered over to the large view-screens that served as my office windows. Normally, they would have been lit with the beautiful worldscapes copied from the OASIS that I preferred, but since she outranked me, the software used her choices instead. Ugly stuff. The apocalyptic realism of the outside world wasn't my idea of pleasant, but Nana seemed to like the constant reminder of what humanity was up against.

"Things aren't going well, Wy," Nana said, sounding a bit more subdued. "We sat down a long time ago, and planned the whole thing out with massive teams of theorists and engineers. We planned for food, and shelter, and entertainment. Everything humanity should need to survive, with the unfortunate assumption that the damn fools would remember that the alternative is extinction. But we didn't plan for all the accidents. We didn't plan for AI to be so unreliable. And we certainly didn't plan for people to be so selfish and stupid."

She was staring at me again, and had definitely stopped being subdued.

"Nana," I said, trailing off slightly.

"Be quiet. Grandson or not, I won't have you lowering our chances of success one percent further. I have your replacement all lined up," she responded. She glanced sharply at me, and added, "Before you get some foolish notion in your brain, being replaced doesn't mean you get to walk out of here and play games all day. If you force me to forget that you're my sweet baby grandson, she'll become your boss, you'll spend the day doing whatever she tells you to do, and it will stay that way till I'm dead and gone."

Her reference to "she" certainly meant some woman from elsewhere on the corporate ladder, but for some reason I immediately thought about having HER as my boss, and became a bit ill. All willingness to continue the verbal sparring match left me. How unsurprising; it looked like my grandmother was going to win yet another argument.

Not that I was alone in the category of the intellectually defeated. She was a tough old bird, had taken down untold overstuffed autocrats throughout the years, and I loved her for it. She was known as the Governess to basically everyone but me; I called her Nana Sam in private, and just Sam in front of everyone else. It surprised people that she allowed our business relationship to be so familiar; I chuckled softly at the memory of the many wide eyes and nervous coughs of interns expecting me to be fired on the spot.

"I know you're not laughing at what I just said. I know you're not even listening to me. Regardless, whether or not you remember this conversation, the next screw up is the last," she said, shaking her head. She turned and walked out of the room, probably heading to something important.

She stuck her head back in, and said "The last, Wyett."

Nana Sam was never one to be fooled, but I had a familiar role to play. I gave her a solid, affirmative, forceful nod, the kind that ended assignment meetings and sent everyone out into the world with a false sense of security that Things Were Going To Be Handled. She was already gone.

This time my sentiment was honest, though. I had taken her advice to heart, and would dedicate myself to fulfilling her request exactly as she had instructed.

Hammer first, debuffs second.